1. Technical Field
The subject matter described herein relates to how an online service provider can safeguard activity information and identities of users. More specifically, it relates to a way to permit analysts to carry out statistical analysis of server log files without disclosing to the analysts activity information that reveals what particular users are doing and who the users are.
2. Background Information
To this point, the state-of-the-art approach has relied on field level access controls. Field level access controls are helpful in preventing an analyst from accessing data of a particular field. The fields that have unique identifier data, such as IP address, cookie ID, or the like, are the ones that are typically protected by the field level access controls. Varying levels of access have been used to make more or fewer fields available to analysts. Unfortunately, using field level access controls may not be the best approach to preventing analysts from accessing unique identifier data. For example, field level access controls may be cumbersome.